MAJOR TRENDS IN LIS RESEARCH: A BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS

This study provides an overview of the Library and Information Science (LIS) research from 1980 through 2017. We employ bibliometric and text mining analyses on a sample of 500 most cited articles to examine the impact of factors such as number of authors, enhanced institutions, document types and keywords on the number of citations that they received. We also investigate major trends in LIS research literature including contribution of different countries, variations across publication years and identifying active research areas and major journal outlets. This study serves as a resource for future studies on LIS trends demonstrating the attributes of the most cited articles in this literature. Specifically our result shows that the most cited articles are from USA, England and China. In Africa, South Africa and Nigeria are among the top 25 countries that are productive in LIS research. The most prolific year in terms of the number of published articles is in 2016 and the total number of citation is 51,589. We also found a positive and statistically significant relationship between the number of publications’ keyword, and the number of citations that they have received. Keywords analysis reveals that LIS research in combination of (academic libraries, information literacy, bibliometric, citation analysis, Open Access) and few others will be future research trends in LIS-related fields. Results obtained from this study can provide valuable information for researchers to better identify future hotspots in LIS-related disciplines